Eagle Forum Legislative Alerts

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

What r/K selection theory does is show that Leftism is not an intellectual movement. Bunny rabbits exhibit the same psychology, and they do it because it is a good way to exploit resource gluts. They avoid violence, run from threats, mate promiscuously, single parent offspring, sexualize young earlier, and have no concept of in-group. Females are bigger and stronger, and more aggressive to provision the young which they raise alone, after they chase the diminutive, cowardly male who impregnated them off. That is the entirety of every Leftist policy and the physical embodiment of Liberals – and it arose without any intellectual input. It was imbued biologically, without even the rabbit’s conscious acquiescence, let alone any logical analysis.

Why do people adopt different political ideologies? How can seemingly equal intellects, presented with the same facts and circumstances disagree so vehemently over how society should be structured? What psychological undercurrents guide people to adopt Conservative or Liberal political beliefs, and where did they come from?

The answer lies in a well known concept in biology, termed r/K Selection Theory. r/K Theory examines how all populations tend to adopt one of two psychologies as a means of adapting their behavior to the presence or absence of environmental resources. The two strategies, termed r and K, each correlate perfectly with the psychologies underlying Liberalism and Conservatism. ...

Liberalism is tolerant of promiscuity, tolerant of single parenting, and more prone to support early sex education for children and the sexualization of cultural influences. Designed to exploit a plethora of resources, one will often find this r-type strategy embodied within prey species, where predation has lowered the population’s numbers, and thereby increased the resources available to its individuals.

The other strategy, termed the K-strategy, imbues those who pursue it with a fierce competitiveness, as well as tendencies towards abstinence until monogamy, two-parent parenting, and delaying sexual activity until later in life. Obviously, this mirrors Conservatism’s acceptance of all sorts of competitive social schemes, from free market capitalism, to war, to individuals owning and carrying private weapons for self defense. Conservatives also tend to favor abstinence until monogamy, two parent parenting with an emphasis upon “family values,” and children being shielded from any sexualized stimuli until later in life. This strategy is found most commonly in species which lack predation, and whose population have grown to the point individuals must compete with each other for the limited environmental resources that they are rapidly running out of.

His paper has more details on his theory. Wikipedia says r/K selection theory is a heuristic for the trade-off between quantity and quality in a natural animal population. More complex models are in use today, but the heuristic remains valid.

The r/K selection theory is mainly a metaphor in humans. We would normally be considered K-selected, except when sub-populations experience runaway exponential growth.

Academic evolutionary psychologists do have other theories for right-left political differences, besides r/K theory, as Steve Pinker explains. One theory is that conservatives are believers in the nuclear family, and another is that liberal are blind to some of the moral distinctions that conservatives commonly make. The truth is probably some combination of these theories.